Manu Luksch, Intermedia Artist, Founding Director of ambientTV.NET

Already at the dawn of the electric age, the invention of the telephone had unleashed fantasies of seeing over distance. Archival films from over a hundred years ago provide a glimpse into the public imagination, the desires and anxieties of the time. Even then, surveillance was regarded as an unavoidable accomplice of televisual connection.

Manu Luksch, Intermedia Artist, Founding Director of ambientTV.NET

1) A screening of the film Life in The Cloud, Tuesday, March 3, 5.30pm, Agnes Etherington Art Centre Atrium

Life in The Cloud traces the desires and anxieties of today’s hyper-connected world back more than a hundred years, when telephone, film and television were new. As revolutionary then as contemporary social media is today, early electric media sparked a fervent utopianism in the public imagination – promising total communication, the annihilation of distance, an end to war. But then, too, there were fears over the erosion of privacy, security, morality. Using rare (and often unseen) archival material from nearly 200 films to articulate the present, Life in The Cloud reveals a history of hopes to share, and betrayals to avoid.

Wednesday, January 28, 2015, 12:30-2pm, Mackintosh-Corry Hall D411

Laura Pinto (Assistant Professor, Faculty of Education, University of Ontario Institute of Technology)

“Dropping the Elf Bomb”: a frames analysis of media and public surveillance discourse in response to “Elf on the Shelf”

In December 2015, the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives published a teaser for an article arguing that the popular Elf on a Shelf toy normalizes panoptic surveillance. In the following weeks, the story and accompanying video (titled Elf et Michelf) went viral online.

In this presentation, Laura Pinto explores and responds to overwhelming public reaction to surveillance within the viral phenomenon based on a corpus of three online stories (Washington Post, Huffington Post, and The Atlantic) and their corresponding reader comments. Mapping five discursive frames (economic, human impact, “us” and “them” divisions, control by powerful others, and moral values) within two evaluative schemas (appropriate/inappropriate surveillance) sheds light on how surveillance was represented and received by the public.

David Murakami Wood will talk about 'listening' as a surveillance practice, with particular reference to the development of coastal listening stations in the UK (the next step from the 'sound mirrors' in Charles Stankievech's exhibition), but will take the history onwards through the building of US and UK intelligence into the telecommunications infrastructure of allied nations in the 1960s, the ECHELON revelations of the 1990s, and the Snowden revelations of the present.

Stankievech and Murakami Wood will let this expand naturally into a conversation about what will hopefully be a compelling and insightful conversation about contemporary and historical surveillance.

Everyone welcome!

Presented by the SSC, Queen's Cultural Studies, and the Agnes Etherington Arts Centre

"Surveillance Studies and the Media: from crafting research to engagement strategies"

Amid a daily stream of news stories on surveillance and privacy, surveillance studies scholars are experiencing a ripe historical moment to intervene in public discussion relating to their research. This informal seminar discusses strategies and tools that surveillance studies scholars can use to engage journalists and media in ways that will leverage their critical expertise into current, and politically significant, debates on surveillance and privacy.

Jeffrey Moon, Academic Director and Data and Government Information Librarian, Queen's University Research Data Centre

At Queen’s, data from several Surveillance Studies Centre research projects have been documented and archived for public access. Learn why this is important and how to access surveys like the Globalization of Personal Data, Privacy and Surveillance, and more. Come see how easy accessing data can be!